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Have a PhD in History; but am currently unemployed, and have been underemployed and unemployed since receiving that doctorate degree.
Have traveled around the world and have lived in various cities across the world, mostly in Europe and in the Americas. Served four years in the US military as a non-combattant.

August 1490 represented a glorious late summer for Renaissance crime, wealth, power, patronage and statecraft, well throughout the entire peninsula of Italy. From the salt water bays of Sicily to the alpine, fresh water lakes between France and Italy, Twelve Families ruled this famous European land. They lovingly murdered and plundered throughout the Boot.

They had the names of Este, Gonzaga, Orsini, Colonna, Montefeltro, Bentivoglio, Petrucci, Baglioni, Malatesta, and then the three most powerful ‘Famiglie’ – the Medici, (the first bankers to the Popes), the Sforza, (the most ruthless ‘condottiere’), and the Aragonese, (possessing the grand Imperial Navy of Spain – later creating the Spanish Armada). And lest I forget, there was also infamous number thirteen – the Borgia, from Valencia, Spain. The great naval empire, republican-oligarchy of Venice, or ‘The Serenissima,’ watched on the sidelines, confident in its own power.

Eventually, the Venetians would also have to resort to the condottieri in order to support their land empire in Italy, and the French monarchy, under Charles VIII, would soon invade the peninsula within a few years. About thirty years later, the last great German emperor, Charles V, would also invade the peninsula. The Italian farmers suffered the sack of their crops through such foreign invasions; but the Twelve families of crime, power and wealth always maintained their rule and preserved their comfortable positions.

During that late medieval period, most of the Twelve Families begot themselves as hired mercenaries, or contract killers. They fought for the Popes, (called Guelphs), or for the German Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, (called Ghibellines), or for other local, powerful families in Italy. They even fought with other European powers – and a few even fought with the Muslim caliphates across the Great Sea, or the Mediterranean. The money was what mattered. These hired killers had the name of ‘condottieri,’ or men of honor under contract.

The successful condottieri, or those late medieval knights, began to acquire landed properties, lots of money, and most importantly, loyal armed followers, called ‘soldati,’ or soldiers, through their legal crimes: theft-pillaging, sacking cities, and murdering rich rivals.

The loyal soldiers remained devoted until the violence, warfare and thefts dried up. Inside the Twelve Families, the loyalty could break apart due to any infraction of the condottieri honor code. There were also lots of illegitimate sons and daughters too – and they also wanted parts of the action.

In 1500, during a wedding of the Baglioni family, a terrible war started, and half the guests murdered the other half! In 1505, inside the Este family, one illegitimate son, the Cardinal Ipolitio, had paid killers to almost gouge out the eyes of his half-brother, Giulio, over the sexual rights to the beautiful Angela Borgia, sister to the infamous Lucrezia. Eventually, brother Alfonso, the legitimate son, had Giulio imprisoned for 53 years.

The Twelve Families of Renaissance Italy generally married into each other’s blood lines – in order to avoid further bloodshed, and thereby create even stronger alliances for family unity. Marriage also brought wealthy dowries that helped keep the wealth, ‘in the family.’

But one family had a different history, and outshined the others. They were the Medicis of Florence. This family began as a merchant clan possessing great monopolies around the city. Their financial successes transformed them into bankers – and especially for the Popes in Rome. Four of the Medici even became Renaissance Popes.

The Medici intermarried into all the other twelve families, including their rivals and enemies. One of the Medici, an illegitimate son, Cosimo di Medici, became a powerful condottiere, and transformed himself into the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Medici represented the greatest arts patrons of the Renaissance, and even greater than the Venetian Empire.

They patronized the best: Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Donatello, Cellini, Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Botticelli. Their palaces slowly accumulated marvelous art treasures, all of which still stand in majestic Florence to this day: the Uffizi, the Pitti, the Belvedere, and Boboli Gardens. They even hired the genius of Pisa, by the name of Galileo, as the personal tutor for the Medici children. Machiavelli, the great political scientist-historian, dedicated his book, ‘The Prince,’ or ‘Il Principe,’ to the Medici.

The Medici Family had ultimately controlled the economic, political, military, and most importantly, the ideological reigns of Renaissance Italy. In Italian, this virtue had the name of ‘podestà,’ or simply pure power. The Medici Family transcended into the Godfathers of the Renaissance.

These historic examples from the Renaissance expose the relations between the criminal state and the criminal economic elites. It has been, and still remains, the perfect example of parasitism, or basically, the scheming of parasites.

The economic elites both influence the state and the state influences the elites. Both clans function together in symbiotic processes similar to worm parasites inside the human body. Like parasitic worms, they move in and out of each other’s spheres and feed off each other. As the parasites take control of certain natural body functions, so the elites take political controls, while the politicians can retire as corporate executives. The state cannot survive without economic elites; likewise, the economic elites cannot function without political bosses in order to enforce their monopoly controls.

The parasitic rule of crime is almost impregnable, but counter-hegemonic blocks, or concocted political alliances, with their many historical absurdities, or as they said in the Renaissance, ‘Mala Fortuna,’ (Bad Fortune), have ultimately defeated such power supports and furtive goals. By the middle of the eighteenth-century, the 1700s, the Medici had lost their power completely, and so, the obese, degenerate Medici offspring married themselves into the powerful royalties of Europe. Their family line had finally ended – forever.

Elite Families are different from the families representing the rest of us. Throughout human history, they have betrayed and murdered each other, so one member could hoard greater controls and more power. It is still this same way for old money elites. Nowadays, they just hide their crimes so much better. Elites families, or old money families, offer higher oaths to their own chosen institutions – the rest of humanity for damnation!

For example, the Kennedy Family in the United States tortured their own daughter, Rosemary, through a lobotomy. They hired a psycho-babble quack to do the ‘surgery’ on her. The Family wanted her eliminated due to her teenage outbursts and her escape from a convent that her parents had forced her into. Rosemary was always an embarrassment because she was ‘slower’ than the other siblings. Rosemary spent the rest of her life locked up inside a closed institution, with special nurses to take of her, condemned to a life in a comatose mental state. The economic elites never tolerate such humiliations.

These putrid elites generally rule through four chosen methods. They first get away with legal crime and state violence. There is one privilege of law for them, and the full fury of the law for the rest of us. Secondly, they always encourage the settlement or immigration of certain ethnic groups, while they hate, imprison, murder and expel others. Thirdly, they tend to champion and fund certain ideologies over others. Fourthly, they patronize particular artists and artistic styles, and the especially fund modern, public art installations.

Some contemporary examples reference the Amerikan Empire – and the elite parasites within it. The Bush Family always had a reputation for partying, but unlike the poor kids in the ghettos and trailer parks, the privileged sons and daughters never did any jail time for their drug and drinking alcohol indiscretions. During the late Vietnam War period, George W. got a nice spot in a Texan Air National Guard unit, which never had a deployment order to ‘Nam.’

In the United States, there always seems to spark up another ‘immigration debate’ in the corporate media. It is not really a debate at all, but the lobbying of certain elite factions in the United States that want more foreign, cheap wage immigrant workers. Meanwhile, the working classes have no real voice. Powerful urban elites mainly want a docile and cowardly wage slave workforce. These elites are urban sophisticates with money, yet they need slave wage labor for basic cleaning and cooking, and other bad jobs. They also see ‘their cities’ as displacement-gentrification zones.

In Captialist-Fascist Amerika, the enemy group in America’s large cities, are the large African-American, or Black populations. According to the elites, those people must go. They are the official criminal class. The elites use every illegal method to get rid of them. They run the mostly, white skinned privilege police forces to harass, or stop and frisk, colored youths. They defend slumlords, or urban property pimps, in extorting rent for rat infested dumps. They fill the prisons with the real dangerous ones, and they allow higher priced supermarkets to open up in the ‘bad sections,’ which the banks redline as areas for destruction. These political thugs desperately want to replace the dangerous classes, representing ‘the Blacks,’ with docile, first generation immigrant, wage slaves.

One great example was the governorship of Nelson Rockefeller. The Rockefeller Family decided that it needed to enter politics and secure its ill-gotten, yet legal looting. In the 1970s, a couple of Rockefellers secured governorships, heads of international elite institutions, banking CEO spots, urban property pimping and art foundation dealing. The most powerful state bully was Nelson Rockefeller of New York State. During his governorship, he passed through one of the toughest anti-illegal drug laws in the country, called ‘The Rockefeller Laws.’ Even low quantities for ‘hard drugs’ garnered at least fifteen years in prison.

Like the old ‘gun control’ laws, which Rockefeller also supported, these ‘drug control’ laws targeted New York City’s African-American population. During his putrid reign, the prisoners of Attica Prison revolted and demanded reforms for better treatment. Many of the revolting prisoners were African-Americans. Rockefeller sent in the State Police with full immunity to exterminate the revolting prisoners – which was what they dutifully did.

These urban elites always demand more ‘gun control.’ They don’t want to ban guns for their own bodyguards, for the local police forces, or for ‘their private armies.’ Instead, they prefer that the criminal classes, meaning the African-Americans, do not possess the rights to own firearms and to defend themselves.

America’s economic elites are also very active on their ideological fronts. They fund particular research centers in universities, and contribute to certain ideological ‘think tanks,’ or academic fronts that defend their preferred ideological positions. They push certain nongovernmental organizations, or non-governmental organizations, into ‘international underdevelopment fields,’ and they set up ideological ‘state advising’ organizations, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the World Economic Forum, etc.

Their ideologies represent a hodgepodge of the different factions of economic elites. Some of them want more population controls and support eugenics. Others demand the continual supremacy of the US dollar as international reserve currency. While various elite groups prefer low inflation and high unemployment; most of them definitely support free trade initiatives for multi-national corporations, and their right to off-shore cheap jobs around the world. There are elite groups who push for more ‘literacy in education,’ or a better qualified workforce, while others want to turn education into a secure profit motive with ‘choice in state schools’ and public monies for private initiatives. America’s economic elites have many other ideological stratagems, but for the sake of this essay, it is too numerous to list all of them.

Finally, these top members of the 1% consider themselves the true patrons of the fine and high arts, good taste, refinement and ‘class.’ They are all active within some type of arts organization. The list has included concert halls, fine art museums, arts fellowships, private collection administration, high-end galleries, and modern, public art placements.

Our top-notch elites also enjoy a variety of high-end restaurants with ethnic diversity-plate presentation twists. Yet, the back kitchens of these fine and wretched dining establishments all have lowly paid immigrants who do not possess legal working papers – the most obedient wage slaves.

Elite economic power and influence seem almost unbreakable. But their sick dreams and perverted desires often twist and turn – and not to their liking usually. What the elites actually receive is quite different from their goals. Hegemony and historical absurdity always confound them – and will continue to do so.

They want white hipster, ‘artiste’ heavens with first generation immigrant communities in ‘their cities,’ but they often manage hard to live-in, expensive cities with few good jobs left, and a violent crime rate that keeps spiraling into dangerous levels. They want gun control and open immigration, yet America’s rural working classes and middle classes know their game, and so they always successfully resist the elites every time they pull one of their influence tricks into pushing their agendas. This is the reason America’s economic elites give total support to the police-surveillance-prison state.

Since the beginning of human civilization, economic elites and the state have existed as parasites between each other. They move and feed in and out of each other, meanwhile, they try to impose their wills on the lesser ones. They have generally won in human history, but their victories are always different from their original plans.

The six truths of history always come into play – and will continue as such. Neither the state, nor the economic elites can exist without each other, yet there always farts some competing factions between them. Although they have a lot fewer numbers compared to the rest of us, their powers and privileges of legal crime award them greater unity and strength.

A cold wind was howling through the medieval streets of Rome during middle December. The days were real short. Darkness even shadowed the moon. This particular day was in the middle of the month, and the year was 1485. Christmas had its parties coming up, but the Pope Caesar had other nefarious plans tucked into his fat stomach. The sinister name of intolerance and hypocrisy was none other than Pope Innocent VIII, (the Eighth).

On this nefarious date he issued a strange papal bull against witchcraft and sorcery that seemed to infect the women of Europe, and especially the First Reich of Germany, bizarrely called, the Holy Roman Empire. This Empire was neither holy nor Roman.

Within this peculiar papal condemnation, he also cited the use of a demonic herb, called cannabis, often found, or imagined, in satanic religious rites. His informant-experts for these underground, conspiratorial satanic covens represented two German Dominican monks, Jakob Spengler and Heinrich Kramer. They would soon publish a nasty book, called ‘The Hammer of the Witches,’ which would help in the murder of close to 200,000 ‘witches,’ mostly marginalized women, during the next 250 years in Europe and in America.

Unfortunately for the plant ‘cannabis sativa,’ this strange and mystical herb from deep Asia, received the taint of evil with the papal stamp of approval. Yet, this same Pope Innocent the Eighth enjoyed some other mortal sins during his reign. He was obese and lived a life of extreme luxury inside the papal palace. He fathered two illegitimate children and had them married off into one of the strongest Families in Renaissance Italy, the Medici. He dipped some of the papal finances into the new Portuguese African Slave Trade. Meanwhile, he tried to revive the Papal Crusades of another Pope Innocent, in order to exterminate the Muslim Turks, the Protestant Waldensians in Northern Italy, and the Hussites in the Czech lands. All cannabis haters in history have shared three evil characteristics: intolerance, gross hypocrisy and state murder.

What is it about cannabis sativa that attracts such hatred and venom? The answer lies in its historical origins: the mystical rites for Lord Shiva and the Islamic Assassins in the medieval period. Cannabis still has these mystical, ‘orientalist’ associations to this actual day. Whether the foreign visitor enters the medinas of Morocco or the festivals dedicated to Shiva in India and Nepal, the scent of the cannabis herb inundates the consciousness.

From its evil oriental connections until its later appearances in the United States, cannabis would connect to a more infamous notoriety. African-American artists smoked the herb while they played their demonic, African sensualized beats, called jazz. Attractive white women even took off their shoes in the smoky clubs, and they danced with the demons. Mestizo, mixed race, Mexican fruit pickers and outlaws also smoked the leaf, called ‘mota,’ during their raucous partying. The dangerous, criminal classes, of course, used the oriental poison. The Amerikan Imperial thugs had taken notice. The historical hatred against cannabis has simply been another combined form of intolerance and murder.

Cannabis is actually a marvelous and natural soft drug. It relaxes and calms the mental nerves, and helps with bouts of nausea and gastrointestinal pains. Some doctors state that cannabis has other helpful healing properties. Cannabis can spark interior mental activity or engaging conversation. It stimulates the human appetites, both culinary and sexual. The drug goes perfectly with foods, entertainment, the arts and it especially compliments other natural drugs found on the Earth, such as alcohol, coffee and tea.

The only negatives to the drug are certain habitual users of it. It seems to have the similar effects of antidepressants on them, which produce lethargy, ego self-obsessions, or minor neuroses. But these are some excessive users. I have also personally met aggressive and successful attorneys that were avid smokers of the weed.

I return to cannabis’ ancient history and its orientalist associations. Lord Shiva, the God of both Creation and Destruction, the Cosmic Dance and the Holy Lingam, (phallic power), the revealer of mystical Tantra, patron of cows, yoga and the third sex, married to the goddess, Parvati, father to the god, Ganesh – also partook of the mystical drink, called ‘soma.’ Legend has it that the mystical drink was none other than ‘bhang,’ a milky concoction containing cannabis.

Shiva’s wandering followers called ‘sadhus,’ still partake of the magical perfumed medicine. During my travels around the world, I have seen these holy men, and some thieving-fakers claiming to exist as sadhus, smoking cannabis out of funnel type ceramic pipes called ‘chillum.’ Watching those holy men in action with their long dread locks, scruffy beards, blue and white-painted dyes, bodies smeared with cow dung, rope necklaces and bracelets, and dirty loin cloths, added to the whole Indian-Asian mystical effect.

On a more common level, during the Hindu festival of Holi, which happens around springtime, young Indians and Nepalese drink the marvelous liquid ‘bhang’ shakes, or ‘lassies,’ and later, hit the public streets throwing brightly colored dyes on the surrounding partiers and walkers. They hit me too – which added to the great fun during that day. Shiva’s gift was a truly a wonderful act.

Islam conquered the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent in the middle of the eleventh century. The cannabis magic of Shiva would also influence the Sufi Muslim mystics that lived in those regions. Even the great Sufi poet and mystic, Rumi, praised the herb and the wine. Cannabis entered the Islamic world: it stayed and it prospered. Still today in the Islamic world from North Africa to Afghanistan, the traveler can spot old men sitting in cafes, wearing their ‘chalaba’ long outfits with hoods. They smoke the green and brown ‘kif’ in their long pipes, while they sip on herbal mint tea, Turkish coffee and chew on honey snacks. Religious controversies have continued between the Sunni, Shia and Sufi branches of Islam – but smoking the flowering buds united them all.

One of the truths of human history has been its reign of absurdity. Cannabis had attached itself to one of the Shia sects of medieval Islam – ‘the Assassins.’ The Assassins were part of the Ismaili sect or the ‘Seveners.’ They also drank the luscious wine and smoked the enchanting herb.

The medieval Japanese Shogunates had their ‘ninjas’; while Medieval Islamic World Culture had their assassins. The assassins lived outside of society. Those disciplined holy warriors squatted in abandoned, foreboding military castles in northern Syria, Iraq and Iran. Their founder, Hassan i Sabbah, or ‘The Old Man of the Mountain,’ organized this Shia sect military order into a hierarchical brotherhood. Inside the castle, the warriors studied religious and philosophical texts, scientific works, learned various languages, and most importantly, the arts of killing. Their three preferred methods moved towards the silent variety: the dagger, the poison and strangulation.

Their victims were always political leaders within the Islamic world. If the Islamic political hack instituted unjust acts, mandated cruel laws, oppressed the poor, allowed poverty to accumulate, or stole lots of money from the just – then the Assassins went on the attack.

The Assassins first left a note pinned with a small dagger within the confines of the caliph or sultan’s palace. If that didn’t work, then the spiritual leader picked an Assassin to fulfill the last deed – a violent death. The Assassins always reached their victims, and after killing the state bum, they would often let frightened onlookers see the terminating work. Many of the assassins never returned from their ultimate missions.

Only one Islamic political-military ruler survived them – Saladin the Great. He survived three attempts on his life. They aroused fear in both the Islamic potentates and the European royal Crusaders. One of the Crusader kings even used the Assassins as allies against his Islamic rivals. Their enemies called them, ‘hashasheen’ in Arabic, or the Troublemakers.

From this Arabic word, the European Crusaders, and especially the Venetian merchant, Marco Polo, tied some connections between the sinister Oriental herbal paste, ‘hashish,’ with Assassin lore. According to the ignorant Euro-experts, hash was the powerful ingredient that transformed the Assassins into fanatical killers. This corrupted link also transformed European languages on the continent.

Most European languages have a separate word for killing and for murder: ‘matar,’ in Spanish, ‘tuer,’ in French, and ‘uccidire,’ in Italian. But these three languages share the same original word for murder, ‘asesinar, assassiner, assassinare.’ This outrageous relation between cannabis and irrational violence even stayed well into the 1930s USA with crap movies such as ‘Reefer Madness.’

This marvelous soft drug of cannabis has had its absurd orientalist associations. The real issue of cannabis was not its properties, but the European hatred for ‘the other,’ which still fuels the sociopathology of the Amerikan Empire. The murderous and hateful world empire still hunts for its victims through its continuous War against Cannabis, and all other ‘illegal drugs.’ The CIA can deal whatever it wants, yet the same US government prefers smokers to rot inside its hundreds of overpopulated prisons. In spite of all of this hate, Lord Shiva’s precious gift still wafts its distinctive breeze throughout all the lands of the Earth.

Spring at the Border was coming together. A personal renaissance was brewing its smoke inside of me once again. I had just visited a despicable academic conference in the western States, and had sworn to never attend one of those scam productions ever again. I had learned a valuable lesson. I decided to celebrate my recent wisdom, and my recent attainment of a useless PhD degree in six years, by visiting a US-Mexican border town – but on the Mexican side.

I had always loved the explorations of North American border cultures, the wild Mexican culture meeting the Empire of ‘Gringolandia.’ I had Mexican friends that lived in the same border town and I could hang with them – and which was what I did. I was partying every night and loving the street life and struggle around me. I even felt compassion for the Mestizo tourist touts and lowlifes that hung around the center of town just to harass the gringo visitors. With all the fleeting happiness that I had felt, I had also forgot an important truth to life. The world in which we must survive is also evil, bad, unjust, hypocritical, criminal and brutal.

Then Sunday came, and even in the wild Mex-Border Town, most everything was shut. I soon found an open cafe with wireless Internet, and saw a Mexican couple sitting inside too. It was near the hostel I was staying at – but the street was eerily deserted. I spent some hours sitting in there enjoying my Internet browsing and nursing my latte coffee drink. I was loving life in code white.

And then towards the end of the afternoon, a criminal vermin sprinted into the cafe quickly and suddenly. I saw the Mexican couple startled when he pointed the gun at them, and then the scum pointed his gun at me.

My adrenalin went into overdrive. Everything slowed down. I carried a knife on me during that period, but I was so stunned physically and mentally that my body moved slowly and roughly. I got up from the table, and the excrement threatened again to shoot me. He ran off with my laptop and the laptop of the Mexican couple. I had just bought that laptop from a web designer too.

And then I had a terrible realization, both of my back up flash drives were connected to the same laptop during the robbery. I understood that I had lost a few personal documents forever. I made a major system backup some six months previous – but six months is a long time. I horribly lost a personal journal that I had written in both English and Spanish. My only consolation was that both backup flash drives had most of my personal documents encrypted. I began to cry. The local Mexi-police arrived, and like usual, did nothing. I walked back to my lonely room in the hostel and entered a world of desperation and excruciating mental trauma. I had to talk with my Mexican friends about such a horrifying incident.

My Mexican friends consoled me, but they also spoke the truth to me. I should not have visited that border town. Border towns are just too dangerous to visit these days. I was a foreigner and I was even more of a target than they were. And they were completely right.

In Mexico, the foreign visitor cannot defend him or herself either. I was totally disarmed during the encounter. According to the ‘Law,’ only the government thugs-narcos have permission to carry weapons and use them on civilians. Americans carrying guns in Mexico can expect a lengthy prison term nowadays. But even if I had a gun on me, with all of the adrenalin dope running up and down my body and soaking my brain, I probably would not have been able to use the weapon properly during that awful situation. In truth, I shouldn’t have been in that cafe on the deserted street corner, and most importantly, I shouldn’t have been in that border town. I had experienced another horrible life warning – never again to forget. Self-defense is not so much about fighting, but awareness.

A lot of gun guys on the Internet love to boast their ‘tough guy’ credentials, such as ‘try prying my gun out of my cold dead hands, or ‘better being judged by twelve, then carried out by six,’ and other macho-male cowardly crap. These Internet liars are a terrible danger in American gun culture. And it is not just the boasting gun guys. I have heard pseudo-alpha male bullshit coming out of the martial arts black belt dudes, saying how they could rip a gun easily out of some criminals’ hands, or that they could have easily gotten behind the perpetrator and broken his neck. Yeah right. Too many of us gun owning citizens have been listening to and reading such nonsense.

Self-defense is real. But it begins and ends with mental awareness – not doing rolls on the karate mat or even doing weapon live fire once per week. Mental awareness is actually the hardest skill to master, but without any mental discipline, all of our martial physical practices are useless. Sun Tzu, the ancient philosopher, in his Art of War, mentions this discipline.

The second practice and discipline of Mental Awareness forces us to analyze our common choices and actions. Principally, we have to understand what social group we fit into. We all fit into some social class distinction. Being honest works.

Do we outwardly represent college educated young people with middle class tastes? Then, we should not do a nighttime partying venture into the rough side of an urban cauldron where young, lumpen class gangbangers, street hustlers and desperate muggers proliferate. Nor ought we to set foot into the biker bar, cowboy bar or the redneck bar for some ‘slumming fun.’ Does the bar have a reputation for fighting and brawling, or does the cafe or restaurant feature the regular visits of our personal enemies or ex-whatevers – inclusive of their jealous boyfriends and girlfriends? Then we need to visit another cafe or restaurant in town. We do have choices in life – and we need to make the intelligent ones. This basic survival guide goes for whatever neighborhood, city, region, land or country that we visit.

The third practice and discipline of Mental Awareness implies practicing our Civil Rights Duties against the cop gangs. Some of us have seen the videos of heroic citizens defending their rights at police encounters, police traffic stops and at uniform checkpoints – but if we don’t practice our rights regularly, and inside the privacy of our homes, then we will not feel ready for our own future donut cop encounters. We are all perps now.

Experiencing the sudden presence of an Amerikan donut cop is quite scary. It prompts the same ‘hunted feelings’ as dealing with a criminal attack: our adrenalin energy immediately spurts into the red zone. Cops know this, and so they try to get us to talk and blabber. This is the worst thing we could do. Even the slightest comment could legally incriminate us.

We must ask the police officer, if ‘we are free to go,’ and if not, then ‘invoking our rights to remain silent and asking to speak to our attorneys.’ If the donut wants to search our bodies or our vehicles, then we need to make clear to the law enforcement officer that ‘we do not consent to any searches.’ Practicing these imaginary scenarios at home will make sure that we run a smooth operation against any live encounter with the Amerikan ultimate police gang state. Nervous potential perps also make the cop-gangers nervous. – and suspicious.

The fourth practice and discipline of Mental Awareness implies letting go of the past and a general forgiveness of the bad things people have done to us. Forgiveness does not mean that we need to go out, look for and befriend our past enemies. Instead, we need to understand that the past died within the past worlds. Our pasts no longer exist in our lives. We are different people now and we must move on and live life. If we drag the past with us, then we will fall into frustration, next anger, and eventually, will commit criminal acts – when we begin to think that vengeance matters more than our freedom.

The fifth and last discipline of Mental Awareness is basic knowledge of the laws. Nowadays, living in the infernos of the Amerikan Empire, there are thousands upon thousands of felony statutes: municipal, state and federal. Unlike the old days in the American West, we cannot legally defend ourselves against potential threats, insults to our honor, and even against actual physical threats. After any act of self-defense, including a home invasion, we will probably have to undergo the horror of the American legal system.

State prosecutors have the criminal authority to charge us for attempted murder, or if we are lucky, manslaughter. It all depends on their political whims. The miscreant’s family might want to sue us for everything we own in civil court. Unless we are members of the economic and political elites, we are all slaves to the cruel fiat of the Amerikan legal nightmare. We should never forget that we live inside of an Empire with both the highest prisoner population in the world, and the world’s largest percentage of prisoners to the general population. The Amerikan prison-concentration camp-gulag is always on the prowl to destroy more lives.

Out West, we recount the tragic story of Matthew Shepard. Matt Shepard was a smart, multi-talented university student at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and he came from a high social class background. His dad was a respected oil company engineer and his family lived in places like Saudi Arabia.

The kid studied in Switzerland, while he could converse in German and Italian. He could also keep up an intelligent discourse on history, politics and culture, and he had an extensive musical collection. Matt looked different too. He was not athletic, but had a good sense of clothes style and decorum in his demeanor. He was also liberated sexually, or commonly called, ‘openly gay.’

Matt Shepard had his group of friends at university and when they wanted to party, once in a while, they did the drive to the only gay bar and cool dance place in the region – all the way to Ft. Collins, Colorado. In the 1990s, DUI crimes began to inflate and the jails began to open up – even out west, so the three-hour ride back and forth, Laramie-Ft. Collins, became a risky venture.

On the night of October 7th, 1998, Matt Shepard wanted to party, and he was alone at home. He lived in a small apartment near downtown Laramie. Instead of waiting for another night, or just buying some booze from a local liquor store, the smartly dressed, up and coming university graduate, decided to ‘slum it.’ He was going to visit the rough bar in town, the infamous Fireside Lounge – alone and unarmed.

The Fireside was the typical western dive with pin-up ‘girls’ stapled to the walls, sports crap pasted along the rafters, and a taxidermied American Buffalo head over the bar. It was definitely not a drinking place for the likes of Matt Shepard.

The dive attracted the worst sort in town. Also inside, were two trailer living, lumpen class losers involved in petty crime and odd jobs with some criminal history. The two western trash bums noticed the outsider already. The low, bottom-eating crap always notices the differences between their harsh world and the higher class of people. There was ‘something up’ with the college kid at the bar – a fag – a helpless weirdo? Later in the night, they decided to give the kid a ride – and then they murdered him for fun.

We Anarchists that are gun owners need to keep this story, and our own embarrassing experiences, in the file storage of our minds. We are outwardly different, smart, well-read, dignified, artistically inclined, and most importantly, we are open to the freedom around us. A majority of the people on Earth are not into these things. Most two-legged animals tend to fall into the dishonorable victim category, or the prey of life – and they don’t know their victimizers. They don’t like to read, nor do they write letters. They are angry and frustrated about living. Yet, we suffering humans – all have the potential to commit murder.

In truth, we are able to embrace some real self-defense – not martial arts moves and just buying more guns for the sake of buying guns – but instead, maintaining our mental disciplines. We can always stay in code yellow, being mindful, aware, and concentrated when performing daily tasks. We should try to avoid the dangerous snares across our paths: fancy rip-off bars or taverns where the violent come to die, unsafe, unlit areas, menacing situations with nasty people, and locales where our enemies like to hide and lurk. We could also regularly practice our anti-donut cop training, so that we will keep silent and composed when under the glare of the state gangs. As Anarchists, we have the courage in letting go of our pasts, embracing mental freedom – and just moving on. We now breathe, walk and act, while we daily strengthen our minds – the first line of auto-defense techniques.